Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
What would you like the priorities of His Majesty’s government to be? I have quite a long list. Sorting out the economy would certainly be up there, as would closing the border. But I imagine the government has had to put such things on the backburner because it turns out that one of its actual
A few years ago the podcaster Lex Fridman published a list of books that he was hoping to read in the year ahead. It included works by George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse and others. If he had published this in the world of print media he might have got back some encouraging noises. But
For perhaps the first time in my life I have experienced ‘fomo’ – fear of missing out. It is strange to feel this teenage sentiment now I am safely in my forties, and even odder that it should occur in relation to a party political conference in Liverpool. Yet as I sat watching videos from
Sir Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, died at his home in Dorset yesterday aged 88. In 2019, he gave a rare in-depth interview to Douglas Murray. Sir Tom Stoppard is Britain’s – perhaps the world’s – leading playwright. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his family left as the German army moved in.
Readers tend not to approve of rows between columnists, but I must take issue with something Lloyd Evans wrote in ‘No life’ last week. Our theatre critic claimed that his companionship ‘is very low calibre’, that he ‘can’t match anyone in conversation’ and that he ‘can barely recall making a witty or worthwhile comment’ in
It is always interesting to see who the American left claims are the leaders of the American right. There was a time during President Trump’s first term when Steve Bannon fitted the role – and relished playing it. Back then most days brought another media profile of the dark genius of the MAGA movement. The
At the end of last month, a judge in Belfast issued a verdict that was both right and wrong. The case related to a man known to the public only as ‘Soldier F’. He was one of the members of the Parachute Regiment involved in the events of the day in January 1972 that became
There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian organised a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of Islingtonians telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s
Britain is beset by a bogeyman. A giant, mystical beast that the public are forever being threatened with. Remember last year when a young Welsh choirboy stabbed three young girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport? Long before we were allowed to know the name of the culprit – Axel Rudakubana
The great John O’Sullivan has a story about Enoch Powell which he keeps promising to put into print. Since he still hasn’t done so, I will risk repeating it here. It occurred during a conversation some years after the Rivers of Blood speech. A group of conservatives were talking, and Powell was among them. At
Researchers from Imperial College London this week released an analysis of the health of voters in the UK. In a publication associated with British Medical Journal, the experts claimed to have found that people who vote for Reform are disproportionately sick. I am sure that the researchers in question could not possibly have enjoyed coming
If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the
It is almost a century since Ronald Knox wrote his ‘Ten Commandments’ for detective fiction. Most of them still hold true. For example, his edict that twin brothers and other lookalikes must not be introduced to the story unless the reader has been prepared for them. Also the forbidding of more than one secret passageway
It was moving to watch Keir Starmer announce this week, from a corridor in Downing Street, that his government has decided to recognise a state of Palestine. Starmer took this bold action at the same time as his French, Canadian and Australian counterparts. But as with Emmanuel Macron, Mark Carney and someone called Anthony Albanese,
There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novelisitic essay ‘Testaments Betrayed’ where he writes about the nature of history. Man walks in a fog, Kundera observes. He stumbles along a path and creates the path as he walks it. When he looks back, he can see the path, he may see the man, but he
I have only been to Alexandria once, some years ago, when Hosni Mubarak was still in power, but it struck me as a sad city. Of course the library was not the library. The lighthouse was not the lighthouse. The city was not the city. I looked around for the remnants of the Greeks who
Tens of thousands of people turned out on the streets last week to protest against mass immigration. The protestors were promptly labelled ‘racist’ by their own government, ‘far-right’ by the New York Times and as having links to ‘neo-Nazis’ by the Guardian. The protests in question happened in cities across Australia, including Sydney – but
At the end of Sky News’s coverage of last year’s Notting Hill Carnival, its correspondent recited the usual list of arrests, stabbings and so on before concluding her piece to camera by saying: ‘But overall it’s been a really peaceful and enjoyable day.’ This year the honour of summing up the beauty of the event
Almost a decade ago the Irish academic Liam Kennedy published a tremendous book with the title Unhappy the Land: the Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? It is a dissection of one of the most curious pathologies in the world: the desire to have been oppressed; a glorying in being repressed. Kennedy, like a few
The only MP I have ever really wanted to marry is Thangam Debbonaire. The former Labour MP for Bristol West and I have little in common. But it has sometimes been a desire of mine to marry her and take her surname, so becoming Mr Debbonaire. Marital relations would doubtless be fraught, but on the
